UID:
almahu_9949568125102882
Format:
1 online resource (ix, 216 pages).
ISBN:
9781003035121
,
1003035124
,
9781000892994
,
1000892999
,
9781000892949
,
1000892948
Series Statement:
Among the Victorians and modernists
Content:
"This book is the study of a religious metaphor: the idea of God as a mother, in British and US literature 1850-1915. It uncovers a tradition of writers for whom divine motherhood embodied ideals felt to be missing from the orthodox masculine deity. Elizabeth Gaskell, Josephine Butler, George Macdonald, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Charlotte Perkins Gilman independently reworked their inherited faith to create a new symbol that better met their religious needs, based on ideal Victorian notions of motherhood and 'mother nature'. Divine motherhood signified compassion, universal salvation, and a realised gospel of social reform led by women primarily to establish sympathetic community. Connected to Victorian feminism, it gave authority to women's voices and to 'feminine' cultural values in the public sphere. It represented divine immanence within the world, often providing the grounds for an ecological ethic, including human-animal fellowship. With reference to writers including Anna Jameson, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Charles, Theodore Parker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Baker Eddy and authors of literary utopias, this book shows the extent of maternal theology in Victorian thought, and its cultural roots. The book reveals a new way in which Victorian writers creatively negotiated between religious tradition and modernity"--
Note:
The maternal image of God in Victorian culture: sympathy, prophecy, nature -- Faces of the Madonna in Elizabeth Gaskell's fiction: feminist justice and the matriarchal divine -- George Macdonald's fairy god mothers: romantic religion, female vocation, and maternalist communities -- Josephine Butler, esoteric Christianity and the biblical motherhood of God -- "The big good thing": Frances Hodgson Burnett's gospel of maternal optimism and Demetrian utopia -- Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "maternal pantheism": religion in utopian motherlands 1889-1915.
Additional Edition:
Print version: Styler, Rebecca. Maternal image of God in Victorian literature New York, NY : Routledge, 2023 ISBN 9780367473631
Language:
English
Keywords:
Electronic books.
;
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
;
Literary criticism
;
Literary criticism.
;
Critiques littéraires.
DOI:
10.4324/9781003035121
URL:
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781003035121
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